EGOMANIACS: Friends, acquaintances – dare I say enemies – who want to see if I’m writing about them. They also want to get the inside track on what I’m up to for their own personal gain.

COMPETITION: They visit the blog to see what I’m covering since they desperately lack creativity.
IDENTIFIERS: These folks feel like they ‘know me.’ They comment on every post, send e-mails with leads and can be considered ‘#1′ fans. It’s nice…but a little scary.

ANONYMOUS: They come, they go. If they return, it will likely be by accident.
DROPPER-BY: This person stops by every few weeks. They’ll occasionally comment. They like your blog, but not enough to visit every day or become actively involved.

IP LOOKUP FREAK: Just because you attended fourth grade with someone apparently gives them license to ‘find you.’ They search high and low, discovering your blog while making a concerted effort to find you.

GOLDILOCKS: In my opinion, the best of the bunch. This reader is not too hot, not too cold; they maintain a nice balance. They pledge their allegiance to your blog but have a life beyond it.

I run a fan site blog (for Stephen Colbert), and I did a whole guest post on Lorelle’s site about what I call the “Crazy Fans.” If you’ve ever been involved in any type of fandom, you know EXACTLY the types of people I’m talking about. To me, they’re the bane of my fandom existence some days.

I’m relatively new to blogging, so I haven’t experienced as many categories as you have. However, I put FEEDJIT on my Blogger.com page, and it showed that I am receiving many more hits than I would have expected! Aren’t there literally millions of people who are blogging now? The NEXT BLOG feature is interesting… just like a grab bag of folks. I add a list of blogs I read, and try to keep it interesting for anyone who cares to drop by.

Given the fact that I am talking about subjects that interest me — and I only started doing this in August 2008, it really turns into a fun activity to which I could become easily addicted.

I actually thought I’d be pretty much alone on a blog, after having been buffeted around by an active political forum for four years which boasted over a hundred-thousand “members.”

I started slowly, but then on one blog written by a Pacific Northwest surgeon/author whom I had interviewed on my radio show, I got into a kind of shouting match with one person and probably got too incensed at his ability to pique me. That may have briefly built a “scratchy persona” for me on a few sites, but that’s the breaks of the game.

Hey, everybody loves a good shouting match, especially when it involves a prominent personality like CNN’s enduring Larry King, whom I dated briefly in the late 1950s when we were both young broadcasters in Miami. No, I didn’t marry him, but Larry was inadvertently responsible for launching me into a career as the one of the first women to do the radio talk format in 1971 in Miami and later, in Boston.

I don’t have anything to sell or prove, since I am almost 70 years old, a woman with more than 50 years in the working world, a mother of two grown children and stepmother to three, as well as grandmother to at least five delightful youngsters from ages 8 to 20 (The big boy’s birthday is February 6 and he’s starting college. Aside to Michael: the check is in the mail and good luck at MCLA!) I consider blogging something of a personal diary that anyone can peek into — if they are curious. Are you?

Furie, what is TRACKBACK? I’m just beginning to understand PERMALINK. I don’t know how to enable TAGS, either. There is really so much to learn.

All of my PREVIOUS POSTERS have been very kind, but I did end up enabling “COMMENT MODERATION” because of one very fiery, maybe unbalanced and unpredictable person. I did some research on him and then had a series of arguments because of his really inappropriate citing of a “sex life” with a well-known TV personality whom I dated briefly decades ago. But I was wrong. I should have just let it roll off my back (my monitor?). I do still visit his site because there are some neat people there.

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